Reinvigorate your leadership team

It’s a new year and a new decade. Perhaps it’s time to reinvigorate yourself and your leadership team by investing in quality tailored leadership training to get things off to a good start this decade. Successful companies only prosper with a strong and vitalised leadership team paving the way.

It’s essential the leaders in an organisation are switched on and tuned-in to what’s happening with their customers, their staff and their competitors. In order to stay relevant, good leaders need to be confident decision makers and competent risk takers, making the changes necessary to stay ahead of the game. It’s a fact of business that the more senior we become in an organisation, the more complex the challenges become. Often the leaders in an organisation are elevated to leadership roles due to technical expertise, possessing skills that are not in fact relevant for leadership. All leaders need to embrace a growth mindset and continue to develop better skills to do what they do, better.

If you answer yes to any of these situations, it might be time to organise leadership training for yourself and your fellow leaders;

  • Have you gotten to your leadership position from your technical expertise? Do you feel what got you to here isn’t going to get you to where you want to be?
  • Does your leadership team need to iron out differences and operate better as a unified front with a shared purpose?
  • Would you like to minimise the stress and overwhelm associated with leading a team of people?
  • Have you been frustrated with under-performing team members?
  • Do you want to reduce the amount of time you spend doing or re-doing you team members’ work?
  • Do you want to increase the level of commitment from your team while avoiding stress and burn out?

Time for some leadership training? Here’s what you ought to aim for. An effective leadership training program should be custom built to transfer skills and change behaviours. While leadership training styles and techniques can vary greatly, I like to focus on the following outcomes and benefits;

A thorough custom-built program to add value to your business. The Stakeholder Analysis lets us specifically target what the program needs to do to achieve specific outcomes. To be effective, leadership training should be relevant and designed with real business outcomes in mind, specific to the unique conditions of the individual organisation. Each company has it’s own ingrained culture and way of doing things. Compare the decision-making process at a startup in a high-growth industry to that of a fifty-year old company in an established market. Leadership training needs to be relevant to the context of your business in order to gain any real traction.

Enjoyable and challenging activities containing real rehearsal and practice of the new behaviours. This kind of hands-on learning most successfully allows participants to be well versed in the application of new skills. Nothing is more effective than hands-on learning as opposed to teacher-centric lectures. More than mechanical role-plays, these activities consciously and unconsciously reinforce and install easy paths to desired behaviours. Real skills are transferred in the most efficient and resilient manner. IN my leadership training, I ensure new behaviours are revisited many times by layering in deeper activities that ensure continual practice and rehearsal. Different aspects of the same skill are honed and enhanced with the objective of repeatedly laying down new ‘Mental Maps’ that become the new default operation, thereby avoiding ineffective rote-style learning.

A real shift in mindset for technical experts to become leaders. In order to develop and grown, people in leadership positions have to recognise the fact that leadership is fundamentally different to managing tasks. A new leadership mindset means a shift in focus from managing tasks and duties well, to being someone who behaves like a leader and has the skills to truly “show up” for their team.

Increase and development of emotional intelligence. This is a critical aspect of good leadership and unlike intellectual intelligence, emotional intelligence can certainly be learned and improved with effort. Stong emotional intelligence allows leaders to communicate better, be more empathetic and cope better under pressure. With these qualities, leaders develop stronger relationships, are more trusted, tend to make better decisions and are less prone to stress, emotional reactions and burn out.

Development of a united team. So often at the commencement of leadership training there are plenty of differing (and opposing) agendas and priorities at play. The leadership team is not working as a united whole but rather it is fragmented and stagnant without a sense of working towards a common goal. Compounded misunderstandings and misalignment of priorities can spell disaster for organisational morale, productivity and ability to move forward. If this kind of fragmentation exists at the leadership level, it undoubtably will infiltrate to all levels of the organisation, negatively impacting culture and productivity. Leadership training should definitely address issues that prevent unity and shared purpose. Ensuring all leaders are heard and understood is the first step in moving towards common ground.

Although there are ‘born leaders’ amongst us, most of us can certainly benefit from learning quality leadership skills and fine tuning the skills we already possess. Could your leadership team benefit from one of my tailored workshops? Please get in touch today. I’d love to help!

Share News